Job jumping can be risky, but staying too long can be riskier

My executive search firm recently interviewed Linda, a talented, articulate, very well qualified candidate with an excellent track record of career advancement. Her skills were an excellent match to our client’s needs. She kept up to date on the latest industry trends, attended training sessions, and updated her department processes to meet changing customer needs. She worked hard to stay at the forefront of her field.

And she didn’t get the job.

She was too risky. Not because she had changed jobs too often, but because she had not changed work environments enough.

Her last 15 years of experience were all with the same executive leadership team. It wasn’t her long tenure that removed her from consideration. It was her lack of experience navigating organizational change and her limited exposure to other ways of thinking and different ways of organizing the work. She had simply spent too much time working with people who shared her worldview.

Job tenure, up to a point, is highly desirable. But at some point it begins to create a risk factor for your career. You need to demonstrate that you can adapt to the disruption of major changes. If you have been through a significant leadership change, you know the strategic shifts, the disruption, and the ambiguity that go along with it. And you know you can live through it and still do good work.

Linda had gone out of her way to stay relevant in her industry, but she loved the creature comfort of her organization’s stability and structure. It was a scary prospect to leave behind everything she spent 20 years building. She was distrustful of change. And that’s what dimmed her career prospects.

Your job stability is not necessarily an asset after about six years with the same firm. Unless your organization is changing leadership or business models, or your industry is dramatically reshaping itself, your skills and your thinking may be growing more stale than you realize.

Without knowing it, you slip into comfortable patterns of thinking and stop asking certain kinds of questions because you already know how the organization will respond. You begin to stay in your lane and stop considering new ideas.

Organizations need risk-takers — now more than ever. They need people who embrace chaos and don’t let the fear of failure hold them back. The employees who seize opportunity in the midst of chaos are often the employees who succeed.

Organizations increasingly need employees who demonstrate agility and adaptability. You are considered risky if you don’t have a track record of adapting to change. Interviewers wonder if you are only good when you are on solid ground. They wonder if you could still be successful navigating choppy seas.

If you have long job tenure and you know it’s time for a job change, the only thing you can do is embrace the change — dive in. You may be overestimating the risk of change — you may find it far more exhilarating than you expected. It may wake up parts of your brain that have long been dormant. But more importantly, you may be significantly underestimating the risk you face in standing still.

Bob Corlett writes about innovation, staffing, leadership and performance management for The Business Journals. He is a founding member of the Editorial Advisory Board for The HR Examiner and the founder and president of Staffing Advisors, an executive search firm located near Washington DC.